How it Works: Setting up the Wine Access IVWA

It takes a lot of work to move more than 3000 bottles of wine from the offices of Wine Access to MacEwan Hall at the University of Calgary. It takes even more work to get all those wines sorted, ordered and stickered for our panel to taste and judge.

The Wine Access team, with the help of several dedicated volunteers, met at the University on Sunday morning to set up before the competition. Tom Firth and his team moved all the wines to the venue on Saturday, and they were waiting to be unpacked and sorted on Sunday.

Anthony Gismondi, our competition director and Editor-in-Chief of Wine Access, was responsible for putting together the judging groups and the flights of wine to be tasted. Our judges are split into panels of three, which allows them to discuss the wines together, to ensure that none of the scores are too extreme and to encourage consensus.

Because we receive so many submissions, not every judge will taste every wine entered into the competition, but they will all taste a mix of varietals and the same number of flights. We do have some wines that are being tasted by more than one panel group. Each flight has between roughly 8-12 wines, and each judging group will taste 7-8 flights of wine a day. That’s a lot of wine!

On Sunday, we unpacked all the wines and sorted them into their respective flights for each judging group. Even with our awesome team of volunteers, it was hours of moving wines, sorting wines and verifying wines. We were very tired at the end.

After we sorted and placed all the wines, we stickered all the wines and wine glasses with a number. In order to keep everything very organized, we assign a wine glass to a bottle of wine, to ensure that each glass is only used once and to ensure that all the wines go out in the order that they should.

Behind the scenes, our volunteers keep the show running — opening bottles, pouring the wines and delivering the glasses to our judges in the next room. Our judges do not enter the wine room, see any of the wines, or really, know anything about what is happening in the wine room. This ensures that our results are entirely honest and based on blind tasting.